Protein-inorganic array construction: design and synthesis of the building blocks.

Herein we describe the design and synthesis of the first series of di-functional ligands for the directed construction of inorganic-protein frameworks. The synthesized ligands are composed of a metal-ion binding moiety (terpyridine-based) conjugated to an epoxysuccinyl peptide, known to covalently bind active cysteine proteases through the active-site cysteine. We explore and optimize two different conjugation chemistries between the di-functionalized metal-ion ligand and the epoxysuccinyl-containing peptide moiety: peptide-bond formation (with limited success) and Cu(I)-catalysed click chemistry (with good results).